Partly through correspondence with Herbert Marcuse he became interested in emerging German and French theoretical debates.
He later transferred to Cornell University where he wrote a dissertation under the tutelage of Paul de Man.
Weber co-translated the first English-language collection of essays by German philosopher Theodor Adorno.
In the late 1970s and 1980s he played a leading role in introducing and interpreting the work of the French philosopher Jacques Derrida and the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, both in the United States and Germany.
Peter Fenves, Kevin McLaughlin, and Marc Redfield, editors, Points of Departure: Samuel Weber Between Spectrality and Reading, 2016, Northwestern University Press